Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

The NEW Illustrated Guide to Mendacity and Folly in the 21st Century.

Well, Barry was on point the other night. He not only went toe to toe with Mitt, but he managed to call one of his remarks “offensive” and look at one point like he was going to slap Willard silly. Americans are ALWAYS impressed by that kind of stuff. He got in the point about the 47% Romney doesn’t care about at the very END of the debate when Romney couldn’t make a comeback, AND he scored the rhetorical point of the evening.

Now, all the critics have pointed out that Obama’s score was a semantic point. Yes, Willard was right that it took us two weeks to determine if the Benghazi incident was a terrorist plot and this was because we got caught with our pants down. With all the cost-cutting, we didn’t have the security in an area where our diplomats were well-liked. Or the intelligence. And President Obama DID call the incident an “act of terrorism” while speaking in broad generalities in the Rose Garden the next day.

But let’s look at this a bit closer. What was Mitt comparing it to? Well, the most likely event that he was comparing it to was that horrible incident some 11 years ago when a bunch of terrorists flew some airplanes into some really big office buildings–that’s right, “9-11″. And we knew then, moments after it occurred, that not only was it an act of terrorism, but we knew WHO was responsible. And why did we know this?

Because Bush and Company had been asleep at the wheel. Intelligence had been advising them since day one of the administration that al-Qaeda and Bin Laden were planning something big, something within the borders of the United States, something that involved stealing jet planes, and the official response was, “Yeah, yeah, you covered your ass–now let’s get on to more important stuff like cutting taxes.”

How many times has something rotten happened that you snapped your fingers and said, “Man, I KNEW THAT was going to happen.” And why did you know? Because you’d screwed up and not taken it into account. So sometimes, speed in declaring something a terrorist act is NOT a very good thing–like when it’s an an indication of stupid complacency. So I’m more than willing to let Barry score on this one. Mitt deserved the mallet from Hammerspace.

What is Hammerspace? Glad you asked–it is the critical name for that extra-dimensional portal out of which a cartoon character grabs a giant mallet to smack down his opponent. I think we can thank Tex Avery for the discovery of the portal as a cartoon device, usually accompanied by a boi-oi-oing sound effect as the mallet strikes and loud music from Carl Stallings, but the name for it is much more recent and too obscure for the wiki to say who first used the term. Anyway, Mitt, welcome to Hammerspace–when you walk into one, you deserve it.

Now let’s see what happens in the next one.

And another sad event. Our condolences to the family of George McGovern, another lion who acted on what he stood for. The last generation of politicians who weren’t all completely beholden to financial interests is fast fading into memory.

CALENDAR

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